Category: Art Journal/ Sketchbook

We were suprised to see this little guy out eating in our yard last night. He actually hopped up into the tray birdfeeder and nibbled a bit. I grabbed my sketchbook and managed to get a few quick drawings before he ran off.Ignore the funny fold line in the middle, I decided to paste the page into my journal and that is the page gutter. I don’t know why I keep doing that. I’ll make a drawing or sketch in my sketchbook and then decide that I want it in my journal. I have to either copy it or paste it in then. I should just start all my work in my journal and leave it there, except the sketchbook with its removable pages seems safer. I can draw random subjects and experiment and rip out what I don’t like. I feel like the journal is for work that has some sort of story or meaning to me, plus it’s harder to deal with drawing disasters in my hardbound journal. Weird, huh?

The Art Journal Fridays prompt for Leap day was to take a leap and try something different. I tried using oil pastels for the first time. I’m not sure if I really like them. They felt like drawing with something that is a cross between a crayon and a tube of lipstick. Very crude and lacking in any fine control. Maybe if I was working on a larger scale that wouldn’t be an issue. They are also very smudgy. That’s not a big problem since I’m used to smudges with charcoal, but I did end up using over 4 coats of fixative just to make the drawing safe to handle. It just wouldn’t stop feeling gooey. I read somewhere that oil pastels never really dry and can still shift years later, a quality I don’t want in a journal that gets handled a lot while it is being made. I might try this medium again later, but I think it would only be for something very loose like gestures. I also won’t be using oil pastels inside a bound journal, yuckkk! However, oil pastels might be good for mindless stress relief drawings that you do and trash…